Care Review chair ‘favours immediate help over child protection investigations’

Speaking to The Times ahead of the review’s first major report, The Case for Change, which is due to be published this week Josh MacAlister said a central theme identified in the review so far is that “we’re doing too much”.

“We’re investigating first when we should be helping,” he said.

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“We’ve got a bit of a runaway train at the moment in terms of the continual surge in section 47 investigations, initiations of child protection conferences, that don’t result in further action, that aren’t correlated with an increase in identified harm.”

"Not enough thought was given to the harm done by investigating too readily. We need to take responsibility for it, because it’s not a neutral process.”

MacAlister said debates over child protection often involved a "false choice", that you either support family rights and help for parents, or are in favour of an interventionist system, adding that he wants social workers to be doing more work with families.

“If social workers aren’t able to build relationships with parents based on trust and partnership, then they won’t know what’s going on for these children — and parents won’t be honest with them, for understandable reasons. And the consequence of that is that we won’t be acting in children’s best interests.”

“It can be true that we are both investigating too much and not helping enough, and that, particularly in the case of teenagers, the system isn’t taking responsibility for keeping them safe, particularly for things that go on outside the home.”

The long-awaited review, which was promised in the Conservative Party’s 2019 general election manifesto, was first announced in January, and officially launched in April. MacAlister said the aim of the first report is to outline the problems, he wants to spend the rest of the year finding solutions.

“The reason I’ve said that after three months we’re publishing our Case for Change and then we’re going to look at solutions is that we can’t spend any more time describing all the issues we see,” MacAlister said.

“There are lots of them and they are deep and they should shake us to act, and they will, and we’ll share that with people publicly so they can react and respond. But we then need to get into the tougher work of coming up with solutions.”

The Social Workers Union, part of BASW, described Macalister’s comments as “dreadful”.

Dreadful view from @JoshMacAlister It would be interesting to hear whom he consulted with to have this view and the last time he was part of a Child Protection / Safe Guarding investigation. pic.twitter.com/TUY9BC5z7z

— Social Workers Union (@SWU_UK) June 13, 2021

Katharine Sacks-Jones, chief executive of Become, the national charity for children in care and care leavers, said the issues identified must be considered within the wider societal and economic context.

The balance between protection & support @JoshMacAlister eludes to sits in the wider context of rising poverty, strained budgets, cuts to welfare & family support services & high case loads. I hope this intervention signals a call for better early & ongoing help for families. https://t.co/pAummRWlsd

— Katharine Sacks-Jones (@KatharineSJ) June 14, 2021

Meanwhile, the Care Review Watch Alliance, a collective of people from all corners of the care community including care experienced people, care professionals, educators and researchers, social workers, foster carers and residential care providers, has launched an information and campaigning website to coordinate concerns about care.

It said the website where you will contain latest blogs, discussions, resources, information and regular updates about child and family social care services and insights about the way the Care Review is working and the evidence that is submitted to it.